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Google's Sitemaps service
Last week, Google released its new Google Sitemaps service.
Despite the name, Google Sitemaps is not a tool that creates
sitemaps for your web site. Google Sitemaps is another way
to submit your web pages to Google.
What is Google Sitemaps?
Google calls it "a beta 'ecosystem' that may help
webmasters with two current challenges: keeping Google informed
about all of your new web pages or updates, and increasing
the coverage of your web pages in the Google index".
Google SiteMaps allows you to tell Google which web sites
it should crawl and it allows you to tell Google that the
content on your site has changed.
How do you submit your sitemap to Google Sitemaps?
The easiest way to submit your web page URLs to Google Sitemaps
is to create a list of URLs in plain text format:
http://www.example.com/index.htm
http://www.example.com/page1.htm
http://www.example.com/page2.htm
http://www.example.com/directory/whatever.htm
Enter one URL per line and save that list with the file ending
.xml. Then login
to Google Sitemaps and upload that file.
Google also offers a more sophisticated tool
(which is rather complicated) that allows you to create a
sitemap but a plain list will also do. Third party tools
are also available.
Does this increase your Google rankings?
No, it doesn't. Using Google Sitemaps will not influence
your rankings. You just tell Google that your web pages exist.
Google still uses its normal ranking algorithms to determine
the ranking of your web pages.
Google even makes no guarantees about when or if your URLs
will be crawled or added to the index if you use Google Sitemaps.
What does this mean to your web site?
Google Sitemaps might be useful to you if your web pages
aren't crawled by Google's spider. However, you won't increase
your Google rankings by using Google Sitemaps.
If Google's spider hasn't crawled your web site yet, your
web site probably doesn't have enough good
incoming links. If your web site has many good incoming
links, Google's spider will find your web site anyway.
In addition, good incoming links tell Google that your web
site is important and that it deserves high rankings.
Detailed information about Google Sitemaps can be found on
this
page. To make sure that Google gives your web pages high
rankings after indexing them, take a look at the recommended
resources.
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